Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture & History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (review)

Terence Ranger is hearing voices again. The author of (among other works) The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia (1970), a pioneering study in Zimbabwe’s colonial history, Ranger has been narrowing his gaze of late. Head cocked and ear cupped, he here listens to yet another set of voices: those emanating from the Matopos hills, the center of a national park and a place considered by some to be the “fontanelle” of the Zimbabwean nation. The Matopos, in sum, occupies a unique place in Zimbabwe’s history, even casting a shadow unto the wider British imperial stage. The final resting place of Cecil Rhodes, the notorious imperialist and diamond magnate for whom the colony of Southern Rhodesia (along with Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia) was named, the Matopos is also reputed to have “inspired” Lord Baden-Powell to found a movement dedicated to the greater glory of instilling discipline and purpose in the lives of male youngsters the world over. The Matopos, then, has some connection, however tenuous, to those noteworthy twentieth-century British contributions to civilization: the Rhodes Scholarship and the Boy Scouts (along with the ancillary Girl Scouts, whose founder, Lady Baden-Powell, presumably was “inspired” by her husband’s work).

In this study, Ranger seeks to “re-instate culture and history into nature” (p. 2). In so proceeding, he gives agency to the indigenous voices of the Matopos, departing from the picturesque colonial representation in which the people of the hills constituted a mere backdrop to the more interesting landscape with its exotic flora and fauna. The story necessarily begins in 1896 with Rhodes’ journey from his base in Cape Town, South Africa, to the Matopos personally to negotiate an end to an anticolonial rebellion by the Ndebele people, whose territory included the hills, which they regarded as sacred. Smitten by its beauty and majesty—and perhaps too by its spirituality, as Baden-Powell would later claim—Rhodes immediately settled on the Matopos as his interment site.

Rhodes all along had desired to be buried in his eponymic colony. The Matopos, however, was not his first choice. Previously, he had set his entombment sights on Great Zimbabwe, the medieval stone structures that filled the colonialists with wonderment, prompting them to speculate wildly about the identity of its “white” builders, it being considered axiomatic that “natives” were incapable of such an amazing architectural feat. On seeing the Matopos, Rhodes changed his mind. Then in 1902, six years after appearing there in the flesh, Rhodes made his final journey to the hills. To add insult to injury, Rhodes’ acolytes arranged for his grave to be guarded by a security detail consisting of members of the subjugated Ndebele nation. Not for nothing did colonial ideologues, though mourning their hero’s passing, exult that “a man stronger than Mzilikazi [the founding monarch of the Ndebele nation]...even in death holds the land. From his vantage point his spirit will keep watch over his conquest” (p. 30).

In the wake of the uprising of 1896, Rhodes and his subordinates encouraged Christian missionaries to set up shop in the Matopos as part of a long-term pacification strategy. The people of the hills, along with the rest of the colony’s African population, hopefully would be persuaded to reconcile themselves to foreign rule through conversion and its attendant benefits, not the least of which was participation in the colonial capitalist economy. In time, the resulting “entrepreneurial Christianity” produced a stratum of yeoman farmers in the Matopos, individuals whose drive and energy would culminate in their undoing, a not altogether unusual colonial conundrum.

The trouble was that the Europeans coveted the Matopos, which, soon after the conquest, they began to eye as “a white playground,” a place that would at once be wild and domesticated (p. 39). Thus was born the idea of the Matopos National Park. The whites had come to believe that the hills should be “preserved...